Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

What is the connection between crawling through a jungle and your ‘to do’ list? What can ejecting out of a stealth bomber teach you about the importance of thinking the worst? What can surviving in extreme situations teach us about surviving everyday life? John Hudson, chief survival instructor to the British military, knows what it takes to survive. Combining firsthand experience with 20 years of studying the choices people have made under extreme pressure, How to Survive is a lifetime’s worth of wisdom about how to apply the principles of survival to everyday life..

1944. Paul Brandt, a German soldier, returns wounded and ashamed from the chaos of the Eastern front to find his village home existing in the dark shadow of an SS rest hut - a luxurious retreat for those who manage the concentration camps, run with the help of a small group of female prisoners. When Brandt glimpses one of these prisoners, he realises that he must find a way to access the hut. For inside is the woman to whom his fate has been tied since their arrest five years before, and now he must do all he can to protect her.

James was in high spirits because he’d finally completed his long awaited autobiography. He didn’t leave a suicide note. But even more suspiciously the record of his life’s environmental achievement, his magnum opus, has gone missing. Troubled, Meg calls in amateur sleuths George and Molly Palmer-Jones to investigate. They soon uncover that life in the Morrissey family is not as idyllic as it seems—relations with ex-wife Cathy are not as friendly as Meg makes out and James appears to have fallen for another women.

Newlyweds Jim and Sarah were welcomed home from their honeymoon to the Scottish island of Kinness with a huge celebration and the whole island was present to witness the bitter end. But did Jim’s younger sister Mary fall? Or was she pushed? George Palmer-Jones, retired birdwatcher and amateur detective, suspected the latter, but proving it would be difficult—no one wanted to upset the balance of the island’s ancient relationships.

The sight is a particularly horrible shock for George Palmer-Jones, ornithologist and amateur detective, as he was an old friend of the victim Eleanor Masefield. George and his wife, Molly, are staying at Eleanor’s family run hotel, and whilst George believed Eleanor was a beautiful and charming widow, Molly has other ideas. Is Molly a little jealous? Or was Eleanor more a black widow–a ruthless manipulator of all those caught in her far-reaching web? Can Molly prove it in time to prevent another death?

Old college friends Rob, Oliver and Mick reunite on a bird-watching tour to America. It is the first time in 20 years the three have been together—since the fateful holiday to America during which they met the enigmatic Laurie.... The tour party is hoping for spectacular sights at High Island on the Upper Texas coast, but as the rain pours down and the birds descend, Mick is discovered dead. Back in Britain, PIs George and Molly Palmer-Jones are working on a minor fraud case with name of Brownscombe Associates attached.

Young Tom French was found dead, lying in a marsh on the Norfolk coast, with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck. One of the best birders in England, Tom had put the village of Rushy on the birdwatching map. Everyone liked him. Or did they? George Palmer-Jones, an elderly birdwatcher who decided quietly to look into the brutal crime, discovered mixed feelings aplenty. Still, he remained baffled by a deed that could have been motivated by thwarted love, pure envy, or something else altogether.

A routine weekend visit by the Gillibry Bird Observatory Trust is made memorable by the owner’s announcement that he is going to sell the island. A sale would mean the end of the Observatory, which for some of the birders made life worth living. A fire in Charlie Todd’s cottage added to their distress. And when, next morning, after a fierce storm, they found Charlie dead in a bird hide, their pleasant September weekend assumed a dangerous new face.

Ursula Ottway’s beautiful cottage is wanted by her landlord, politician Marcus Grenville, so he can convert it into a holiday residence. So when Ursula discovers that the illegal use of poisoned bait on Grenville’s land has killed not only a rare bird of prey but her two beloved cats, she storms to his house and threatens revenge. Shocked and saddened to find Ursula’s body the morning after this conflict, Molly and her husband, George, decide to piece together a picture of Ursula’s last days.

A rare and unrecorded sea bird captures all the birders attention whilst right under their noses the most fanatical birder of them all disappears. Later, Greg Franks’s corpse, the head bludgeoned, is found floating in the sea. Had it not been for Greg Franks, amateur detective George Palmer-Jones would not have been on the bird watching trip in Cornwall to the first place. He had been hired by Greg Franks’s anxious parents to try and persuade their errant son to return home.

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in the gap between the war and the death of Stalin. Both brothers are arrested, and their rivalry slowly complicates itself over a decade in the slave camp above the Arctic Circle.

Twins Aaron and Clive have been estranged for 40 years. Aaron still lives in the empty, crumbling tower block on the riverside in Deptford where they grew up. Clive is a successful property developer, determined to turn the tower into luxury flats. But Aaron is blocking the plan, and their petty squabble becomes something much greater when two ghosts from the past - twins Annette and Christine - appear in the tower. At once, the desolate estate becomes a stage on which the events of one scorching summer are relived - a summer that shattered their lives and changed everything forever.

1976, war-torn Beirut. Under the cover of a massive firefight, an unknown band of armed men blast their way into the Imperial Bank of Beirut. Over the next 48 hours they load up three trucks with gold bullion, and the raiders and the loot disappear forever. Two weeks earlier, a young SAS Major newly arrived in The Regiment had tasked his men with scoping out just such a Beirut bank robbery - strictly as an exercise only.

Kate Thompson - glamorous housewife-turned-MP - surprises everyone with her meteoric rise at Westminster. When Kate is sent as a trade minister to India, she hopes it will be her moment to shine. But, embroiled in a personal scandal, she gets drawn into a dangerous world of corruption and political intrigue....

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS distract the Nazis to allow airborne landings to go ahead? September 1944: in the wake of the successful Anvil landings, the Allies plan airborne landings in the Orléans Gap. To soften the enemy beforehand, they decide to drop a squadron of men and jeeps in Central France, to hit enemy positions and distract attention from the landings taking place elsewhere.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But will the SAS patrol escape the deadly Malayan jungle alive?Malaya in the 1950s, and Communist terrorists wage a bloody war against the country's estates and rubber plantation owners. Chased into the interior by British army units, the guerrillas soon become experts at survival and evasion, emerging from the jungle only to launch increasingly ferocious attacks.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS face the might of Rommel's army and win? In the North African desert in 1941, the war is being won by the brilliant German commander General Rommel, and the British are in retreat on all fronts. A young British army lieutenant, David Stirling, believes that the only way to reverse this situation is to attack the enemy behind their own lines, using small groups of men who can insert by land, sea or air as required.

Young, rich widow Diana Porteous has inherited a vast collection of paintings, but she feels without purpose again. Then her beloved stepgrandson comes up with the idea for an exhibition of portraits with the title A Question of Guilt. It starts as a joke, but soon they are preparing the huge wine cellar of the old schoolhouse by the sea, in spite of those with misgivings as to its suitability.

Retired architect Otto Laird is living a peaceful, if slightly bemused, existence in Switzerland with his second wife, Anika. Once renowned for his radical designs, Otto now spends his days communing with nature and writing eccentric letters to old friends (which he doesn't mail). But Otto's comfortable life is rudely interrupted when he learns that his most significant and revolutionary building, Marlowe House, a 1960s tower block estate in South London, is set to be demolished.

It is a sweltering July in the mid-1970s, and for Will Flemyng, foreign office minister, the temperature is rising with each passing hour. A mysterious death has exposed secret passions in government, bringing on a political crisis that will draw him back into a familiar world of danger and deceit. For Flemyng has a past. He was trained as a spy for a life behind enemy lines and now he's compelled to go back.